Tracking Hurricane Florence with GOES-16 and SATcat

Remote Sensing

2018-09-13Jeff Siarto

The 2018 Atlantic hurricane season is the second in a row to feature three simultaneous storms–the most recent, and most dangerous being Florence which reached Category 4 status earlier in the week (now at a Category 2) as it moves within a day of the Carolinas and US Mid-Atlantic Region. NOAA has a full suite of tools at their disposal for forecasting and monitoring storms including buoys, hurricane-chasing airplanes, and a fleet of satellites that monitor weather and climate around the globe.

The newest satellite in NOAAs arsenal is GOES-16 (formally GOES-R) which sits in geostationary orbit above the Americas and provides high resolution, near-realtime imagery of the Western Hemisphere across visible, infrared, and near-infrared spectral bands. Because of its unique orbit, GOES-16 is able to provide live snapshots of the entire Earth–commonly referred to as full disk images. To give you a sense of the power in this storm, we’ve used our SATcat tool to build full resolution video from the GOES-16 vector data so you can see the movement and formation of the storm across the Atlantic.